Publications by authors named "Michael Wurm"

Pollinating insects provide essential ecosystem services, and using time-lapse photography to automate their observation could improve monitoring efficiency. Computer vision models, trained on clear citizen science photos, can detect insects in similar images with high accuracy, but their performance in images taken using time-lapse photography is unknown. We evaluated the generalisation of three lightweight YOLO detectors (YOLOv5-nano, YOLOv5-small, YOLOv7-tiny), previously trained on citizen science images, for detecting ~ 1,300 flower-visiting arthropod individuals in nearly 24,000 time-lapse images captured with a fixed smartphone setup.

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Motorized traffic often causes road noise directly in front of our homes and windows. Yet long-term exposure to noise impact life's quality and can potentially cause negative effects on human health. Furthermore, social and behavioral effects have been measured.

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Accessibility to public transport is a fundamental component of connecting individuals to urban services. Guided by the UN Habitat Sustainable Development Goal 11.2, which aims to ensure accessible, safe, affordable, and sustainable transport systems for all, our study focuses specifically on accessibility as a key dimension of achieving this goal and its implications for social and spatial equity.

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Predicting and quantifying phenotypic consequences of genetic variants in rare disorders is a major challenge, particularly pertinent for 'actionable' genes such as thyroid hormone transporter MCT8 (encoded by the X-linked SLC16A2 gene), where loss-of-function (LoF) variants cause a rare neurodevelopmental and (treatable) metabolic disorder in males. The combination of deep phenotyping data with functional and computational tests and with outcomes in population cohorts, enabled us to: (i) identify the genetic aetiology of divergent clinical phenotypes of MCT8 deficiency with genotype-phenotype relationships present across survival and 24 out of 32 disease features; (ii) demonstrate a mild phenocopy in ~400,000 individuals with common genetic variants in MCT8; (iii) assess therapeutic effectiveness, which did not differ among LoF-categories; (iv) advance structural insights in normal and mutated MCT8 by delineating seven critical functional domains; (v) create a pathogenicity-severity MCT8 variant classifier that accurately predicted pathogenicity (AUC:0.91) and severity (AUC:0.

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Introduction: Currently, over two million war refugees live in Germany. Exposure to war and flight is associated with a high burden of diseases, not limited to mental disorders and infections. We aimed to analyze diabetes treatment and outcomes of pediatric refugees and migrants from Ukraine and Syria/Afghanistan with type 1 diabetes (T1D) in German-speaking countries.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the relationship between poorly controlled type 1 diabetes (T1D) and elevated liver enzyme levels (ALT) in children and adolescents, suggesting a link to metabolic dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).
  • Researchers analyzed data from over 32,000 young patients with T1D from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, using statistical models to identify associations over time.
  • Results indicated that children with poorly managed T1D had significantly higher odds of elevated ALT levels, highlighting the importance of effective diabetes management in reducing the risk of MASLD.
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Develoment of image recognition AI algorithms for flower-visiting arthropods has the potential to revolutionize the way we monitor pollinators. Ecologists need light-weight models that can be deployed in a field setting and can classify with high accuracy. We tested the performance of three deep learning light-weight models, YOLOv5nano, YOLOv5small, and YOLOv7tiny, at object recognition and classification in real time on eight groups of flower-visiting arthropods using open-source image data.

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The surface urban heat island (SUHI) affects the quality of urban life. Because varying urban structures have varying impacts on SUHI, it is crucial to understand the impact of land use/land cover characteristics for improving the quality of life in cities and urban health. Satellite-based data on land surface temperatures (LST) and derived land use/cover pattern (LUCP) indicators provide an efficient opportunity to derive the required data at a large scale.

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High-resolution population mapping is of high relevance for developing and implementing tailored actions in several fields: From decision making in crisis management to urban planning. Earth Observation has considerably contributed to the development of methods for disaggregating population figures with higher resolution data into fine-grained population maps. However, which method is most suitable on the basis of the available data, and how the spatial units and accuracy metrics affect the validation process is not fully known.

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Objective: To investigate whether socioeconomic deprivation and urbanization are associated with the frequency of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) at diagnosis of pediatric type 1 diabetes.

Research Design And Methods: Children and adolescents aged ≤18 years, living in Germany, with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes documented between 2016 and 2019 in the Diabetes Prospective Follow-up Registry (DPV; Diabetes-Patienten-Verlaufsdokumentation), were assigned to a quintile of regional socioeconomic deprivation (German Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation) and to a degree of urbanization (Eurostat) by using their residence postal code. With multiple logistic regression models, we investigated whether the frequency of DKA at diagnosis was associated with socioeconomic deprivation or urbanization and whether associations differed by age-group, sex, or migration status.

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Background And Aims: Glycogen storage disease type I (GSD I) is associated with hyperlipidemia, a known risk factor for premature atherosclerosis. Few studies have addressed endothelial dysfunction in patients with GSD I, and these studies yielded controversial results.

Methods And Results: We investigated vascular dysfunction in a cohort of 32 patients with GSD I (26 GSD Ia, 6 GSD Ib, mean age 20.

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Objectives: Patients with childhood hypophosphatasia (HPP) often have unspecific symptoms. It was our aim to identify patients with mild forms of HPP by laboratory data screening for decreased alkaline phosphatase (AP) within a pediatric population.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective hospital-based data screening for AP activity below the following limits: Girls: ≤12 years: <125 U/L; >12 years: <50 U/L Boys: ≤14 years: <125 U/L; >14 years: <70 U/L.

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Article Synopsis
  • Regularization techniques like lasso and elastic net help improve regression models by enhancing coefficient estimation and prediction accuracy while also aiding in variable selection.
  • The authors propose a coordinate descent algorithm to fit a range of ordinal regression models with an elastic net penalty, addressing gaps in current software for regularized regression.
  • They introduce a new model class called ELMO, which encompasses models like multinomial and ordinal logistic regression, and provide an R package that implements this algorithm.
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Background: Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is a potentially life-threatening metabolic disorder that can occur with manifestation of type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D). The aim of this study was to analyze the incidence of DKA at the time of the diagnosis of T1D in childhood and adolescence, the risk factors, and regional approaches to reduce the incidence of ketoacidosis.

Methods: We investigated the proportion of patients under 18 years of age with DKA (defined as pH <7.

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Objectives: With this study, our aim was to quantify the relative risk (RR) of diabetic ketoacidosis at diagnosis of type 1 diabetes during the year 2020 and to assess whether it was associated with the regional incidence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases and deaths.

Methods: Multicenter cohort study based on data from the German Diabetes Prospective Follow-up Registry. The monthly RR for ketoacidosis in 2020 was estimated from observed and expected rates in 3238 children with new-onset type 1 diabetes.

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Aims: To analyse the association between coeliac disease (CD) and depression in children, adolescents, and young adults with type 1 diabetes (T1D).

Methods: We included 79,067 T1D patients aged 6-20 years, with at least six months of diabetes duration, and treatment data between 1995 and 2019 were documented in the diabetes patient follow-up registry. We categorized patients into four groups: T1D only (n = 73,699), T1 + CD (n = 3379), T1D + depression (n = 1877), or T1D + CD + depression (n = 112).

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: Hepatic glycogen storage diseases (GSDs) are inborn errors of metabolism affecting the synthesis or breakdown of glycogen in the liver. This study, for the first time, systematically assessed vitamin B status in a large cohort of hepatic GSD patients. : Plasma vitamin B, total plasma homocysteine (tHcy) and methylmalonic acid concentrations were measured in 44 patients with hepatic GSDs and compared to 42 healthy age- and gender-matched controls.

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Environmental conditions influence human health and interact with other factors such as DNA, lifestyle, or the social environment. Earth observations from space provide data on the most diverse manifestations of these environmental conditions and make it possible to quantify them spatially. Using two examples - the availability of open and recreational space and the spatial distribution of air pollution - this article presents the potential of Earth observations for health studies.

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Background: Disordered thyroid hormone transport, due to mutations in the SLC16A2 gene encoding monocarboxylate transporter 8 (MCT8), is characterised by intellectual and motor disability resulting from cerebral hypothyroidism and chronic peripheral thyrotoxicosis. We sought to systematically assess the phenotypic characteristics and natural history of patients with MCT8 deficiency.

Methods: We did an international, multicentre, cohort study, analysing retrospective data from Jan 1, 2003, to Dec 31, 2019, from patients with MCT8 deficiency followed up in 47 hospitals in 22 countries globally.

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Background: Wolcott-Rallison syndrome (WRS) is characterized by permanent early-onset diabetes, skeletal dysplasia and several additional features, e.g. recurrent liver failure.

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Objective: We investigated direct effects of a therapeutic growth hormone dose on lipolysis, glucose and amino acid metabolism.

Methods: This crossover microdialysis trial involved six healthy male volunteers receiving single subcutaneous injections of both growth hormone (0.035 mg/kg) and placebo (0.

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Background Prolactin-secreting pituitary adenomas in childhood and adolescence are rare. First-line therapy consists of dopamine agonists (DAs) like cabergoline. Experience in treating prolactinomas in paediatric and adolescent patients is limited.

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Major guidelines for HIV recommend that testing should be provided in a way that is adapted to the lifeworld of groups at risk. However, precise definitions as to what adaption to the lifeworld means are missing. Therefore, this research project evaluated how the lifeworld approach can be operationalized in regard to HIV testing and how voluntary counseling and testing services can use this approach to improve efficacy.

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Background/objective: Microvascular alterations play a key role in the development of diabetes complications. Retinal vessel analysis is a unique method to examine microvascular changes in brain-derived vessels.

Methods: Sixty-seven pediatric and adolescent type 1 diabetes patients and 58 healthy control persons (mean age 12.

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This paper introduces a new algorithm to estimate and perform inferences on a recently proposed and developed semiparametric generalized linear model (glm). Rather than selecting a particular parametric exponential family model, such as the Poisson distribution, this semiparametric glm assumes that the response is drawn from the more general exponential tilt family. The regression coefficients and unspecified reference distribution are estimated by maximizing a semiparametric likelihood.

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